EXFIL by Anthony Patton (best book reader txt) 📕

I looked up, tapping my pen. “Of course not, but what possible motivation would he have to work for the Chinese?” I gestured to the surveillance file. “Look, I’m supposed to meet Lieutenant Colonel Li today, so I need to get through these reports, if you don’t mind.”

While working overseas, we rarely had the benefit of a surveillance team to monitor individuals of interest. This meant we had to rely on our own resources to collect the information, such as where to randomly bump a person, or details about their personal lives that we could use to our advantage—what we call operational intelligence.

In America, however, for targets like Li, we could bring the full force of the FBI to conduct surveillance around the clock. The biggest challenge with surveillance was that 99% of the time was spent twiddling your thumbs, waiting for something out of the ordinary to happen, which made it difficult to assess the value of continued efforts. No one wanted to stop the surveillance and miss something important, but no one liked approving the overtime hours, either.

The surveillance teams had found nothing unusual during the previous week. Every morning, Li would kiss his wife at his D.C. townhome and drive his maroon Lexus RX 350 SUV to the Chinese Embassy off Connecticut Avenue. For lunch, he would join other Chinese diplomats, always at a Chinese restaurant. At the end of the day, he would return home for a quiet evening, except for the two times he attended diplomatic functions.

Never once did the surveillance team observe anything unusual—no chalk marks, no brief encounters with strangers, no women, no gambling, and no attempts to lose surveillance.

As an Intelligence Officer, he was trained to detect surveillance teams and just continued his normal life without missing a single beat.

Running a successful meeting with a would-be source was an art and a science.

You had to consider things like the venue, the ability of others to see you and hear your conversation, security cameras, the day of the week, time of day, proximity to crime, and so on. The goal was to select an appropriately discreet venue where two people could talk, which could be interpreted in different ways in different environments. For art, you had to consider the would-be source and where you hoped to steer the relationship, such as giving the right exposure to hopes, dreams, and desires, to gain insights into what made that person tick.

The professional Intelligence Officer placed symbols before a would-be source to discern the complex machinery operating below the surface.

Lieutenant Colonel Li was a trained professional, not susceptible to the usual techniques, so I selected venues where I knew I could raise topics of mutual interest to culminate with a finale that played to his national pride, which I rehearsed multiple times before the meeting.

We arrived at the World War II memorial near the Washington Monument and met with a firm handshake. I had toured the memorials on the Mall with foreign visitors several times during my career, but knowing that others were doing it for the first time was always a source of pride. On each occasion, I tried to see the monuments through the eyes of the visitors. Foreigners couldn’t help but secretly admire what we had accomplished and our role in the march of history.

As we strolled to the Pacific arc of the monument, Li stopped to take a photo with his phone.

I had left mine in the hotel to avoid connecting us in the corporate databases. Given his training, I assessed that he was taking photos to build a cover story for his colleagues at the Chinese embassy, who might be suspicious of a missed call or curious about what he was doing alone on a Saturday. Of course, he never proposed that we pose together for a selfie.

While many tourists were in cargo shorts, baseball caps, and flip-flops, he wore polished black dress shoes, pressed gray dress slacks, and a striped dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up just below the elbow. We were hiding in plain sight. With so many people around, we were blending in. No one would notice us.

“Are you familiar with the American Volunteer Group, the Flying Tigers?”

He turned and lowered his phone. “The First American Volunteer Group arrived in Burma in November 1941 with P-40Bs, commanded by Claire Lee Chennault.”

“I see you’re a historian. If my memory serves me correctly,” I said, feigning recollection, “the Second American Volunteer Group was formed in the fall of 1941 with A-28 and A-20 bombers.”

Li nodded with a smile.

“You are correct,” he said. “It is amazing the things you can learn on Wikipedia.”

“It sure is,” I said with a smile, knowing that he was telling me he couldn’t be fooled by such tactics, and had probably done the same thing.

“Of course,” he continued with a tilt of the head, “the American Volunteer Group supported the Nationalist government, the Kuomintang, which broke away from China to create Taiwan. They now buy American military weapons and technology that violates the spirit of your One China policy.”

“There’s that,” I said and led the way toward the Lincoln Memorial. During World War II, we had a common enemy—Japan—so this first stop was designed to put him at ease and to not see us as enemies, with the understanding that he was aware of this and would have the tools of the trade to resist it or even try to use them against me.

One of the biggest challenges of intelligence operations was suspending moral outrage to build relationships with people we would like to see in prison, even dead. Li had been responsible for several destructive cyberattacks against our great republic, and yet here we were strolling in the park like best friends. This ability to suppress emotions for the greater good was the same skill that allowed us to run terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan who had once been dedicated to killing us.

Intelligence Officers were warned to not “fall in love”